Can U.S. Heal its Political Divisions?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

Deep divisions and intense passions have seized American public discourse since 2016, alarming many academics. With the possible impeachment of President Donald Trump, these will widen further.

“We have these two sides aligned against each other,” Patrick Deneen, a political science professor at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, argues. 

“One is represented by liberal elites in major institutions who spend all their time denouncing the populists and the people, while claiming the mantle of being democrats. 

“And we have populists represented by their own elites who spend all their time denouncing elites but aren’t themselves especially savory characters.” 

They occupy different societies with different values, and the two major political parties are emissaries of those differences, which are increasingly irreconcilable.

Each side pursues ideological purity at any cost because it is increasingly the route to power.

For Prof. Deneen, the urgent challenge is not to eliminate either of these parties but to pressure the elites, both financial and cultural, to put aside their animosities and participate in what he refers to as a “mixed regime.”

“Partisans in the electorate don’t like each other,” observes Steven W. Webster of Emory University in Atlanta. “That encourages political elites to bicker with one another. People in the electorate observe that. And that encourages them to bicker with one another.” 

Over the past several decades, the policy preferences of Democratic and Republican elites and voters have diverged considerably on a wide range of issues. 

Democrats have moved to the left and Republicans have moved even more sharply to the right. As a result, the ideological distance between each party’s supporters and the opposing party has increased markedly.

Unfortunately the reality of sharp partisan divisions over policy issues makes the possibility of reconciliation and cooperation between those in opposing partisan camps much less likely.

Some historians have sounded a similar alarm. “How, when, and why has the United States now arrived at the brink of a veritable civil war?” Victor Davis Hanson, a historian with Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, asks in a July 2018 essay in National Review. 

Hanson fears the United States is “nearing a point comparable to 1860,” a year before the start of the American Civil War.

“Left-Right factionalism is increasingly fueled by geography,” he contends. “Red and blue states ensure that locale magnifies differences that were mostly manageable during the administrations of Ford, Carter, Reagan, the Bushes, and Clinton.”

Hansen blames, among other things, globalization, which “created new iconic billionaires in high tech and finance, and their subsidiaries of coastal elites, while hollowing out the muscular jobs largely in the American interior.”

Robert Reich, a former secretary of labour under President Bill Clinton, who is now a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, imagines serious social unrest, in which Trump’s potential impeachment lead to calls for his supporters to take to the streets.

Besides, he recently observed in a Sept. 22 article on the website Salon, “no president has ever been sent packing. Richard Nixon resigned because he saw it coming. Trump would sooner start a civil war.”

A dangerously polarized and partisan country would get worse.